a memoir / scrapbook of NYC in the early 1970s

Just Waiting on a Friend

A little routine is now locked into place: frequently checking in with my (mostly) New York City pals, with mutual reassurances and holding fears in check. Plus the occasional well-deserved vent. We are “New York Tough” as Governor Cuomo reminds us daily. We share other information: web links of interest to inform, amuse, or distract while plugged into our devices and desktops, as well as rediscovering the old-fashioned telephone call. We send little “I’m still here” heads-ups to each other across the wide, wide pandemic.

Another way to check in on friends who have drifted from my inner circle (either by the tides of life, or algorithm) is through Facebook. Probably 97% of my friends (or anyone else I need to look up) are on it. Knowing its dark side, I try to engage here mindfully, often with distrust or disdain, while not ashamed to admit that I need (and even love) it at certain times. Like, now. And so, Jim Green immediately came to mind. Time to click the search bar.

In many ways, Jim had proven to be even more in love with New York than I was. In 1971 (when we first met as neighbors in a tenement on Avenue A and 2nd Street), I would have begged to differ, but after nearly fifty years I see the truth. I left the city (who betrayed whom?) and he stayed, continuing to root himself into the cracked sidewalks with a Chi that probably began with watching old Bowery Boy matinees while growing up in Baltimore.

Jim flourished as only a true maven can, in that fertile Greenwich Village street compost that the Beat Generation left behind for us stragglers. Over the decades, he morphed into various lifestyles, losing the hippie frizz and Dylan shades, but always with his trademark smile and fervor (including built-in contradiction, if you could read the fuzzy fine print). In the ’80s, as AIDS was decimating so much of the city’s creative life, Jim cut hair at the Silver Fox studio in the Village and loved Ronald Reagan. I was briefly a client, but neither his haircuts nor his politics suited me. No hard feelings, but decades would pass before we reconnected. His name, number, and address remained unchanged in my book, written in ink.

A few years after 9/11, I gave him a call. Jim had become a serious Tai Chi instructor, and lived in the same studio apartment in the West Village. His hair was short and grey, but his boyish charm and megawatt grin were the same as I remembered. We sat in simple straight-back chairs facing each other as we reminisced dirty old New York, and he shared some of his lifestyle details. I was fascinated to learn how he foraged restaurant dumpsters for perfectly good food, otherwise wasted. I got the impression that this was a decision made more from principle than penury, matching his spartan surroundings, but more importantly, his evolving monastic values. Throughout the conversation, I kept thinking what a true New York character Jim had become. It was a total compliment.

One day he appeared on my screen as a Facebook friend request. I nearly fell over. He had embraced social media, and within a few months had mastered the iPhone camera, roaming the city streets, documenting and posting photos on his Facebook page. It was as if Bill Cunningham had passed the torch to Jim Green. What I always called Millennials (no matter how many years or alphabet letters had passed), he called iGens, and they were his muses. He shot them night and day, with a kind of unabashed, open love and acceptance that I could never muster. We groaned about them, but I could tell he enjoyed being the wise old Boomer in his building, whose owner would have loved to evict and quadruple the rent for the never-ending flow of trust fund kids. (How dare they have not have a hard-knock life and still call this an authentic NYC experience!) Jim just kept on being Jim, while our city kept changing.

Eventually I had to check the Facebook box that allows one to see less of a friend’s posts. I wholly supported his newfound creativity in theory, but I just didn’t want photos of “those damn kids” clogging up my newsfeed 24/7. (Sorry, Jim. I hope you never knew that.)

photo credit: Jim Green 2019

On April 7, I clicked on your name. (How are you faring, your streets now swept of life? How is lockdown in that tiny studio?) I knew you could weather the storm; I just knew it. Yet I had this gut feeling. I had learned on this day that John Prine had died. Soon after we met, you told me I should listen to him (in that gung-ho, John Wayne-way you had. I wasn’t ready). I learned that you had passed peacefully on February 24. Cancer, not coronavirus. You must have felt the pandemic approaching, but it wouldn’t get you, and of that I am glad.

The city streets are extra-quiet without Jim Green on them, doing your Tai Chi in a pocket park, or capturing life that is momentarily suspended. I look forward to a day when I’ll feel you on my walkabouts. I can imagine it right now, something like: “Watts!! Right here is where John Garfield died! You gotta see Body and Soul!”

Our only new friend was our downstairs neighbor. A recent Baltimore transplant and Dylan fanatic, Jim had hair past his shoulders and managed to be more of a movie nut than I was. He had seen Midnight Cowboy sixteen times to my three, and conversed in exclamation points:

“Watts!! You gotta see the John Ford triple bill playing at the St. Marks! Red River! Best film ever made! John Wayne and Montgomery Clift!”

Soon he would almost convince me that a macrobiotic diet was the way to go, and lent me his bible: You Are All Sanpaku by George Ohsawa, who introduced the west to eating according to the gospel of yin and yang.

Not quite ready to completely plug into his cult-like energy, I managed to ask, “So, what is ‘sanpaku’?”

Jim was only too happy to explain. “It’s when the whites of the eye can be seen below the iris! Look at our unhealthy western diet—all that over-processed white flour and white sugar! Look at JFK—he had sanpaku really bad!”

According to my new friend, this condition had something to do with the demise of the president, and so for weeks I couldn’t help but stare into the mirror to see if my irises were floating up into my head, precipitating some horrible lurking fate. — Hell’s Kitchen and Couture Dreams